Tag: Republican Party

The Line in the Sand: Sheriff Jones holding Ayman Soliman in the Butler County Jail

It is probably the most crucial topic in the world at the moment: the question of police and their impact on a prosperous society.  It just so happens that I had an excellent example of the effects of good police work in my own backyard with Sheriff Jones and the Butler County Sheriff’s department, as they were the center of controversy, as the very controversial inmate, Ayman Soliman, was being held at the Butler County Jail awaiting his trial date for his asylum case.  Radical groups have pressured Governor DeWine to have Soliman released from the Butler County jail.  Soliman has been the cause of considerable controversy, and it’s interesting to see who has rallied to his cause.  Rioters tried to shut down a bridge in downtown Cincinnati over Soliman’s arrest.  And at the Butler County jail, there have been protestors attempting to block roads, which has led to the arrest of several stringy-haired socialist types from the radical left.  Soliman himself, as Sheriff Jones told me when I sat down with him to discuss this case, indicated that a significant amount of pretension about Ayman Soliman has emerged while he has been in jail, a self-importance that has led to trouble, inspiring disciplinary action.  Soliman had been a Muslim chaplain from Egypt at the Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati, where he was arrested during a routine check-in.  Soliman had his asylum revoked in early June 2025, and on July 9th, after 3 hours of questioning by ICE officials, he was arrested and put into the Butler County Jail under an ICE contract.  Homeland Security, under the new enforcement guidelines of Kristi Noem, confirmed that Soliman was on the FBI terror watchlist for a direct connection to the Muslim Brotherhood.  And that this background was triggered years earlier when he tried to get a job at the Oregon Department of Corrections in Umatilla. 

When Sheriff Jones and I spoke, his understanding of his job is to follow the law, not to make it.  And based on Soliman’s past, there was a lot in it that was very sketchy.  He might be innocent.  It might be unfair.  At best, the case looks to be that the Obama administration and that of Biden were very loose on crime and allowed for controversial immigrants like Ayman Soliman to live in America illegally as a Muslim religious leader, where he holds an MA in Islamic Studies from Egypt and has pursued advanced degrees, including an MDiv in Islamic studies and Muslim Chaplaincy and a PhD in Islamic Studies.  During the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, Soliman participated in student protests and worked as a freelance journalist, during which he was arrested multiple times by the Egyptian authorities.  After being beaten and tortured in custody in Egypt, he fled to America seeking asylum and had been living in the background for many years, leading up to that questioning in Blue Ash, Ohio, before landing in the Butler County Jail.  The point of the matter is that under Trump’s administration, specifically the much-improved Homeland Security under Kristi Noem and the ICE enforcement of Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar,  Ayman Soliman was high on the list of cases to deal with for a reason.  And from Sheriff Jones’ perspective, he has to trust the federal law that put that inmate in his jail.  He can’t allow a mob to persuade him in his police work, and since the arrest of Ayman Soliman, that has been the clear intention of the radical left to lobby Governor DeWine in the hopes of putting pressure on Sheriff Jones to release the Muslim spiritual leader. 

So, the topic is why good police work is important.  Why federalizing the police in Washington, D.C. was a good thing and why Chicago needs to do the same.  Why is it great that the Trump administration blew up a drug trafficking boat from Venezuela?  And why Sheriff Jones was all that stood between chaos and law at the Butler County Jail in holding this suspicious person that the Trump administration flagged on a terror watch list because of his background with the Muslim Brotherhood front group Al-Gam’iyya al-Shar’iyya, an Egyptian nonprofit providing medical aid and charity services.  Recently, a letter was presented to Governor DeWine with 1,100 signatures on July 25, 2025, urging his intervention in the Butler County jail. However, Jones was quick to dismiss any executive orders that DeWine might attempt to initiate, with an open refusal to listen to the governor.  Jones instead stated that he worked for the people of Butler County, who could re-hire or fire him at their discretion.  And that they were the highest authority, not a state governor, which has shocked many people.  But Sheriff Jones, and this isn’t the only occasion, has stood firm under tremendous pressure.  So this was indeed a powerful story that needed to be examined.  And why was Butler County at the center of this international incident?  I personally attribute this to the six terms in office that Sheriff Jones has had, as well as the stability of law enforcement that has existed under his leadership.  The Butler County Sheriff’s department, I think, is one of the best in the country, and Sheriff Jones is undoubtedly one of the best that there is anywhere, and because of that fabulous police presence, Butler County as a region has thrived in ways that are unique in the world. 

I consider the Butler County Jail to be a well-run business.  I’ve visited there several times, I’ve toured the jail, eaten the food, and observed the booking process.  It’s undoubtedly one of the best jail systems in the state of Ohio and is clearly one of the best in the country.  And saying all that, it’s one of the best in the world.  Ayman Soliman should consider himself fortunate that he’s in the Butler County Jail until his next immigration court date set for December 15, 2025, and there are other legal challenges to be pursued in October.  There are numerous complications, but what it has all revealed is the kind of people working in the background to undermine U.S. law. If not for strong figures like Sheriff Jones, chaos would be running rampant.  Having him at the center of this international story is very beneficial for the overall Trump administration’s objectives of cleaning up America from the kind of people trying to destroy it in the background.  Seeing the liberal groups and the communist organizations that have rallied to the defense of an Islamic holy man attached to a third-tier terror watch list has been unnerving because Sheriff Jones’ adherence to law and order has forced those voices to reveal too much about themselves.  And to show the rest of the world how hostile to peace and Western civilization that they really are, including popular publications as Rolling Stone magazine.  Knowing Sheriff Jones as I do, I know he shares with me a genuine desire to have a law-and-order society, especially on the topic of illegal immigration.  He and I have been advocates for better border security for over 20 years.  And finally, with the Trump administration, there is someone committed to the cause.  And Sheriff Jones is undoubtedly ready to step in and do what he can to make that border security successful.  And it was great that he drew that line in the sand under tremendous pressure from the Governor’s office in Ohio to push chaos away and hold the line.  This has a lot to do with why so many people enjoy success in Butler County, because there are great police officers there who keep the evil people hiding in the shadows.  And under the Trump administration, they are finally willing to enter those shadows and arrest the characters hiding there.  And there will be a lot more good to come.  However, for now, Sheriff Jones has Ayman Soliman in the Butler County Jail, which is beneficial for all of us, including him. It’s much better than the treatment he will get in Egypt for reasons they understand best.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

President Trump is the Greatest of all Time: There will never be anyone like him again

Of course, it’s time to talk about Trump as the greatest president in the history of the world.  Just in the first six months of his second term, he could be said to be much better than George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, and he still has a long way to go.  We can have a reverence for the past all we want, but let’s face it, we are living history here.  The way Trump handled the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill was jaw-droppingly excellent. There are so many good things in it that would have never made it through the legislative process except by his mass attack and all-night long whipping of votes.  For instance, if taken on its own, just the School Choice provision would have brought Washington, D.C., to its knees with a stalemate, as the teacher unions would have shut the city down with protests.  The Bill, as guided by Trump, includes a federal tax credit scholarship program known as the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), which incentivizes donations to scholarship-granting organizations to cover expenses such as private school tuition, tutoring, and educational materials for K-12 students.  This breaks loose the control that starts the process of connecting money to the child, not the school, and it’s going to ruffle some feathers.  But that is quite a healthy thing.  And after all the work it took to pass the Big Beautiful Bill and to sign it on the Fourth of July under a military fly over, Trump said to the audience with the seriousness only he could pull off that while visiting Steve Scalise in the hospital as a Democrat assassin had shot him at a baseball game, that he could tell that his wife loved him.  Because a lot of times, women wouldn’t be so sad that they were about to lose their husbands.  What a very true statement, and said in such a lofty moment, it was something uniquely American, and that only Trump could have pulled off. 

There are plenty of reasons to point to Trump and make the case for why he is now the greatest President America has ever had, and he still has three more years to do a lot more.  It will come down to how he pulled off the Big Beautiful Bill passage, even the approach with mass to overwhelm any opposition to it.  It was essentially the opposite of Obamacare, establishing a clear cut in revenue that the government has in the form of taxation.  The most effective way to compel the government to reduce its spending is to eliminate the revenue sources it uses to abuse its power.  Trump is currently discussing the removal of federal taxation on private property, which is sparking a similar discussion in the states.  I know that in Ohio, it is getting elevated attention.  So, with tax cuts, and that is what the Big Beautiful Bill does best, it made the Trump tax cuts permanent. It has No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, and loads of other tax-cutting incentives that are quite remarkable on their own.  But to be in one big piece of legislation and to see it pass the House, the Senate, then come back to the House for final passage just a day before the target of the Fourth of July, to be signed on that day was astonishing.  Of course, the Senate did a wrap-around from K-Street lobbyists that tossed in some extra garbage, knowing that time was of the essence, but Trump didn’t let that stop the momentum.  He addressed the concerns of House members regarding the Bill as presented by the Senate and made deals with them to secure their support.  And he worked the phones all night.

I didn’t sleep at all that night as the House ran through a procedural vote to see if they had the votes.  I had C-SPAN on in the living room, talk radio on in the garage, and all my computers were streaming commentary from various news reporting methods that were covering the story in real-time.  It was a remarkably positive experience, more so than we typically think of in government of any kind.  Trump didn’t just sit back and take a passive role; he worked harder than anybody I’ve ever seen in legislative endeavors to get his key campaign promises passed in an epic push to meet the July deadline.  Most everyone else would have done their part, then resided in the background, only to see their deadline slip and linger into July. They would have likely seen the legislation die by a thousand cuts, and it would have never passed.  That’s why big things like this seldom ever happen.  All the typical momentum killers were paralyzed from advancing doubt, and history will never forget how Trump handled the process of passing his Big Beautiful Bill.  More than anything, I think Trump set the stage for Republicans to win massively in the midterms.  Usually, that’s the period in every presidency that the other political side gets a chance by the public to see if they can do any better, because nothing ever really happens.  However, with Trump, he has already accomplished some significant things, and those tax cuts are poised to jump-start the economy in ways that most people have yet to understand fully.  And that momentum will not be stopped.

However, the most remarkable thing about Trump is that he did not make it all about himself; he built a team of people around him.  At the signing ceremony at the White House, he had most of the key members of the House and Senate in attendance to be part of that historic process.  Trump did more than pass a bill; he gave Republicans a win that they had never achieved before in their long history.  It was more than just passing legislation; it was about making Republicans part of the winning team that Americans of all political backgrounds will appreciate and want more of.  Democrats, with all their radical efforts, could not stop anything Trump was trying to do, making this BBB legislation one of the most unique in all of human history, going back to the societies of Greek and Roman cultures.  There has never been a President or world leader like Trump who didn’t collapse under their weight, yet has improved significantly with age and pressure. What we have now is mind-bending historically, and the ramifications will be long-lasting and far into the future.  For many hundreds of years, people will continue to talk about how great Trump was and how he was the best president of all time.  And we may never see another like him.  But you know what’s best, he isn’t even close to being done.  There is a lot more that he plans to do, and with the tremendous economic expansion that America will experience under his guidance, people will vote for anyone like him that they can get, which has changed politics forever.  And I couldn’t be happier about all of it.  I’ve known for a long time what his return to the White House would mean.  However, seeing it happen in real-time is an extraordinary piece of history.  The world will greatly benefit. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

What Zohran Mamdani Means in New York: Democrats were always open socialists, communists, and Marxists

The victimization role that Zohran Mamdani is trying to utilize against President Trump isn’t going to work.  I know many people are worried about Mamdani and that he is a sign of things to come, and he is.  But not in the way that people fear.  Zohran Kwame Mamdani is an American politician born on October 18, 1991, in Kampala, Uganda. He is a member of the New York State Assembly, representing the 36th district in Queens since 2021. He is a Democratic Socialist and a member of the Democratic Party. Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City in the 2025 primary, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo. If elected, he would be the city’s first Muslim and Indian American mayor.  Trump is right to discuss arresting and deporting communists.  America has gone to war to fight communism, and when political people try to infuse communism into our political structure, they deserve the ridicule that they get.  Trump has no obligation to play nice with socialism and communism.  Mamdani is a Democrat who does not shy away from the socialist label, as most do, because he is making a move that Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have paved the way for.  I’ve been talking about it for a long time. The communists, Marxists, and socialists in America reside behind the disguise of the Democrat Party, and it is built into their policy-making.  So knowing that, we have no obligation to play nice with them.  Democrats are not equal at the table in a capitalist country if socialism is what they are really about, which it is and always has been.  We cannot discuss with Democrats if that is what they are.  Those ideologies are just too far apart, and Trump is right to indicate playing rough with them.

I’m not surprised that Mamdani won a primary election.  I’m not sure he wins in the general election.  There are a lot of people in New York City who have considered themselves capitalists, but have adopted Democrat ideas to prove to their leftist friends that they are not mean people.  That argument is so “pre-Trump,” and it’s not going to work now for Mamdani.  The politics of meanness is over; it took our country to a place we didn’t want to go, and that fever broke during the summer of 2024 with that assassination attempt against Trump, and he stood up and pumped his fist in the air, declaring we should all fight.  Before that, there were many people, perhaps most people, who loved capitalism, but they adopted elements of socialism to prove to left-leaning political types that they were not what they were being called.  Name-calling was a political tactic employed by the Democrat Party as it evolved into power.  And as long as it worked, they were going to keep doing it.  Mamdoni thinks that he is going to run a victimization campaign and that people will respond to him because they feel sorry for him.  And that’s not how all this is going to emerge.  Socialism is not going to make an open takeover of our political system.  Now that people are forced to see the Democrat Party for what it is, they will reject those political candidates.  And they won’t be able to win just because they are people of color, or that they are Muslim, or that they are nice-looking kids who can make TikTok videos.  Victimization politics have given us many miserable politicians, and we have learned a hard lesson that the Trump administration is giving us relief from.  And now that people know what they are picking, Democrats are going to get much different results than they have had in the past.

It’s not that people accepted Marxists, socialists, and communists.  But people did not like President Obama and his socialist behavior, sold to us by his skin color.  The kind of world that we have did not make people feel good.  That wasn’t a platform for success for Bernie Sanders, Cortez, and Mamdani to utilize in the future.  Instead, the same kind of Marxists are always there, but the Democrats lost their cover story.  So it’s much harder for them now.  Regionally, in places like New York, where high-density populations typically vote for Democrat ideas, these socialist candidates can perform well.  However, in general populations across the rest of the country, they won’t do well at all because people are no longer voting out of guilt.  Trump has shown people that they can vote for their self-interest and get much better results than voting for someone because they are Muslim.  Or a person of color.  Those are trends that are going out with the tide, not coming in.  And everything that Mamdani is saying assumes that the victimization politics is the wave of the future.  And that’s just not the case.  It is not advisable to base your political platform on the ability to win a vote simply because people feel sorry for you.  You want people to vote for you because you make them feel good about themselves.  And that is what Trump has unlocked in politics: the ability to vote for candidates because they want to achieve a better standard of living and solve real problems.  Not because they feel guilty about slavery or economic inequality.  And in the end, in New York, it’s a capitalist town that has had an identity crisis, finding more confidence in itself with Trump in the White House. 

Keep in mind that we have been teaching kids socialism in public schools for more than three decades now, so people have wide-ranging feelings on the topic.  What a teacher’s union-controlled socialist sentiment has taught them does not represent their instincts toward self-interest.  I am often stunned by how uninformed people can be, not because they are unintelligent. Still, when you talk to them, you get to hear such contrasts in their behavior that the totality of their utterances evolves into substandard assumptions. They don’t know what they think about anything, nor do they have the confidence to articulate their thoughts publicly, because they have been taught in school to suppress their opinions.  Not to express them, but to advance socialist enterprises in America.  But for anybody who wants a house, or a car, or a family, socialism is the enemy to those things, and people have a natural revulsion to anything that might prevent happiness along those lines.  So, even if they are taught socialism, their instincts often run counter to it. In America, where people have a perpetual choice, they will not choose the limits of Marxism and its umbrella political ideas, such as socialism and communism.  They have picked Trump once the peer pressure was cast away, and they were alone in the voting booth.  And that is how it will be in New York as well as the rest of the country.  The trend is not moving toward socialism, but rather away from it, as we consider that the schools have failed us.  And we aren’t happy about it.  And Zohran Mamdani might be good at TikTok videos that all but the most naive suckers enjoy. Still, when it comes to economic policy, people have learned many hard lessons from the mistakes of the Obama administration. They don’t want them in the future of politics, so while some might be shocked that a socialist beat a mainstreamer in a primary election, they shouldn’t be, because socialism is where the Democrat Party is.  But it’s not where the rest of the country is.  Republicans are poised to win by even larger margins because people are finally feeling free to express themselves more openly, and that doesn’t do well for politicians like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Re-Elect Todd Minniear for Liberty Township Trustee: The untold story of Ford’s Garage

Many people are unaware of the story, but it’s one of those great examples of how some politicians in the world do good things in the background that nobody knows about, but that greatly enhance people’s lives.  And we’re talking about Todd Minniear, the highly regarded Liberty Township Trustee, who is about to complete his first term and is up for re-election this year, 2025.  When he was first elected, I considered it one of the most fantastic Christmas presents I could have hoped for.  We needed a constitutional conservative in Liberty Township in a position like that because Liberty Township had a significant problem.  It’s always been a great place to live.  I’ve lived in Liberty Township most of my life.  I’ve traveled extensively around the world, and when my wife and I were first married, we tried to live in various places.  But we moved back to Liberty Township many years ago because it simply was the best place to live.  We had been living in Mason, and the school system was so bad back then that we had to homeschool our kids.  Lakota, as a public school, wasn’t much better, but everything else about the community was just so good.  But like all good communities, it’s hard to provide good political leadership because all these special interest groups start making suggestions that are often beyond the wheelhouse of most people’s professions, and they get hoodwinked into making bad decisions.  And that’s what happened with zoning in Liberty Township.  Word got out that it was a great place to live, and everyone wanted to move to the land north of Cincinnati, with its abundant farmland and white picket fences.  So, a lot of property was bought up, and many homes were built, but along the way, very few commercial areas were created to help alleviate the taxation problem. 

So Liberty Township needed a trustee who could say know to the right things, and that is all the Agenda 21 goofy stuff that came from the United Nations sustainability plans that were flowed down through university training and into the minds of the college kids who were being trained to be the next generation land use planners.  And they have been a disaster, because along with all the ridiculous roundabouts, which are an entirely European design that we mindlessly inherited, like a bunch of little brothers appeasing an older brother who picks on us, we adopted all those methods into our community planning, and it has degraded the living experience predictably.  And to stay great, Liberty Township needed to develop a mind of its own, and Todd Minniear has been that kind of trustee.  When you are the best place to live in the world, quite literally, you don’t let yourself get picked on by anybody, especially a bunch of socialist trained community development planners.  The private sector knows a lot more about these things, and competition should sort out the good from the bad, and be allowed to do that.  Recently, under Todd’s leadership, the Trustees in Liberty Township removed the high-density housing requirements from future building projects, which is a significant development.  The news reporting took that move as building fences to the outside world to keep out the poor and disadvantaged.  However, logic suggests that to protect value, you must keep away people who have less of it.  Otherwise, they bring their problems to your doorstep, and that requires value judgments that might hurt the feelings of people who have not made very good decisions in their lives.  To maintain a good community, you need to reward people who make good decisions and keep the bar high, so that those who didn’t aren’t living in the same space.

As I met Todd Minniear at Liberty Center to discuss some of these high-density housing issues, my daughter was with me, and we were talking about Japan and how people we know who have traveled there and have tattoos were ridiculed in some places for having them.  In some cases, businesses will refuse to serve people who have tattoos, because they see it as a detrimental element to social interaction, and they ridicule it in their society.  I had just recently returned from Japan, which is what I wanted to discuss with Todd about Liberty Center.  Japan’s cities are very clean, and their work ethic is excellent.  Even in their downtown areas, they have nice, convenient stores that are open 24/7.  There is a nice one near a hotel I often stay at in Kobe, and I thought something like that would be perfect for the current location at Liberty Center, across the street from Cooper’s Hawk and the new Flats that have been built, where many people are currently living.  To maintain a good community, you must have high standards and hold others accountable for living up to them.  And that is the challenge, because Liberty Township is such a great place to live, but the housing costs are very high, the temptation to bring in more affordable housing, as the land use sustainability plans all address in the same European socialist way, more high density living which allows people who have made bad decisions in their lives and do not have the financial means to move into Liberty Township, to move into an apartment or an attached single family unit. 

One of my favorite places to eat in Liberty Township is the new Ford’s Garage at Liberty Center, where Todd Minniear has a signature hamburger named after him, which I order every time I visit.  In the location where the restaurant was built, Todd was the trustee who said no to an apartment complex design intended for that area when the mall could not find commercial businesses to fill that very valuable square.  There was a lot of complaining at the time, but eventually, Ford’s Garage restaurant moved in, and that solved many of the problems. It was great that the apartments did not get built there, as the restaurant is far more valuable as a land use option.  It does a lot more for the mall than just bringing in more people who don’t pay enough in taxes to accommodate their presence, whereas a business does.  And Liberty Township needs more businesses that bring in more people from a 25-mile radius who spend money in Liberty Township, then go home.  So that the taxpayers in Liberty Township aren’t on the hook for all the infrastructure.  And it’s decisions like those that Todd Minniear has made that have greatly improved Liberty Township and preserved its value, rather than letting mindless land use plans destroy it. These decisions don’t represent what’s good and original about the community—sometimes saying no leads to a better yes eventually.  And that is certainly the case with Ford’s Garage.  There was considerable pressure to approve high-density housing projects and accommodate the influx of investment dollars into the area.  However, by saying no, Todd Minniear was able to inspire a much better ‘yes’ in the future, which is precisely why we want Todd to serve for many more years as a trustee.  He’s been great, and there is room to do a whole lot more with the Millikin interchange project.  But to set a high bar, you have to live up to it, and often, that means saying no to disreputable social elements, to socialist land use plans, and political sentiments that come from other places, and people bring that garbage with them wherever they go.  We need good political leadership to sort it all out, and Todd Minniear has been just the right touch, and we could use a lot more of him in the years to come.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Todd Minniear and the Liberty Township Trustees: Protecting a great area from bottom feeders and other social parasites

It was always a disaster in the planning to guide development to include apartment and attached single-family homes.  That was a ridiculous Agenda 21 sustainable living idea that does not stem from American needs, but rather from the United Nations, and it’s good to see that Todd Minniear, the great trustee of Liberty Township, is fighting back against this ridiculous trend.  Because it’s all about value and the quality of living, and even if it comes out sounding mean and not very equitable, those are not values that can build a good society.  You can’t put too many apartments into a community full of people who don’t own property and expect everything to go well.  The population density is one thing.  However, the kind of people who live in apartments is quite another matter.  When a township like Liberty puts together a comprehensive plan, as I have explained over the years, the kind of people who are hired to make those plans are trained in universities to make Agenda 21 and 2030 from the United Nations a priority, and within those constructs is the notion that the most sustainable living is to stack humans on top of each other and prevent them as much as possible from getting in their car and driving somewhere.  Because the goal is to lower the carbon footprint of people with all kinds of hippie thoughts about protecting the planet and taking away individual development in favor of collective surrender to the common good as defined by the parameters of communism, exported from Europe.  And it ends up in communities like Liberty through the comprehensive plans that their building planners implement.  It’s one of those things that often slips under the radar when elected trustees review their comprehensive development plans for approval, and the context of what’s in them isn’t well understood.  We tend to think that people who write comprehensive plans are smart, but what often happens is that they learn too late that they were trained to be radicalized liberals taught on a destructive, anti-American agenda.

Everyone wants to live in Liberty Township, and when the area Journal News newspaper reported what Todd Minniear and the other trustees had done, they picked up on the sentiment correctly by stating, “Liberty Twp. Is closing its borders to future developments that include apartments or attached single-family homes, as trustees approved changes in its 2020 comprehensive plan and future land use map – which guides development.”  Most of the time, trustees in their positions across the country think they are hiring good people with excellent college credentials when they bring in individuals to write their land-use plans.  And their lives have not prepared them for the shell game that comes with such land use planners.  But it’s an industry full of parasitic communists trained in their colleges to implement extreme liberal politics into everything their careers touch.  Remember, it’s not where people went to school, but the kind of garbage they learned there that’s so dangerous.  And in Liberty Twp’s case, the value comes from the type of property people can buy, and how it restricts many people without shared values, bringing them together unnaturally, which eventually lowers the area’s value.  The kind of people who end up living in apartments and attached single-family homes tend to be people who didn’t make very good decisions in life, and when you start stacking those kinds of people into dense property use, they vote that way at the ballot box and pretty soon you have all their bad decisions changing the politics of your community into something else, often destructive.  And not protecting property values because parasitic tendencies were allowed to permeate. 

Of course, the implication made by the Journal News is that Liberty Twp is moving toward exclusivity by closing its borders to outsiders, when the socialist trend is to make everything more equitable.  With Liberty Township being such a nice place to live, the goal of the trustees, as defined by radical leftist community planners who teach the values of Marxism in colleges, is to make valuable places to live more accessible to everyone.  Because everyone deserves to live somewhere nice.  And if you’ve looked around Liberty Township, you now see apartments going up everywhere.  And what goes into them are apartment-dwelling people who vote, and they vote with the kind of values that come with people who don’t have profound roots in property ownership.  I like the proposed type of living at the Liberty Center development, which combines mixed-use shopping and living, creating a big city environment that gives kids growing up in the area a reason not to move to New York City or Los Angeles to experience that kind of life in their post-college years.  However, the downside is that more apartments mean more voters, as opposed to the wealthy homeowner of a property worth more than $400,000 who wants to keep it that way.  All over the country, when you study why communities fail, it’s because they didn’t protect what made them valuable in the first place.  And once you start letting bottom feeders move into your area, you’ll run into them at gas stations and the grocery store, and they bring down a positive living experience everywhere they go.  And while that doesn’t sound fair or equitable, it’s the truth.  Values decline, whether they are property or social, when we fail to protect them. 

Making it too easy for people who are not very good or wise to live in your area will only bring trouble.  People who make poor decisions in their lives are likely to reflect that in their voting behavior when we invite them to join our communities and live in an apartment, just to be fair to them.  They bring with them trashy kids, destructive lifestyles, and disastrous extensions of their families who visit them in a condition of dereliction.  And attacking that premise of value is baked into the background of all Agenda 21 and 2030 land use plans.  When you speak to these kinds of people, DEI policies, specifically equity and inclusion, are their primary concerns.  And builders end up following those ridiculous concepts in their architectural plans, and before you know it, you have a mother of five with three different fathers of those kids, all of whom visit her, coming and going, living next to a property worth more than a million dollars.  And they are all shopping at Kroger together and regretting it.  And when it comes time to vote, they disregard the million-dollar property owner vote because there are more of them, and because of the terrible decisions they have made in life, they are now voting for more government services, as they are never going to own a million-dollar property of their own.  And soon thereafter, you have a community in decline as people with value pick up and move away, where they don’t have to be around losers in life in their leisure time.  Thankfully, there are people like Todd Minniear who are finally standing up to this kind of nonsense.  Yes, suppose Liberty Township wants to maintain its value. In that case, just as the United States is learning to do, we must hold people accountable for earning their place in the community by working hard and making good decisions that live up to the high standards of value that make communities great.  However, when you make good things available to everyone, whether through comprehensive land use plans that stack property density on top of each other mindlessly, or through more government services that cost taxpayers a lot of money, social decline is not far behind.  When that value isn’t protected, of course, a community will move into decline.  And once that happens, nobody is happy.  This is a good position for the Liberty Township Trustees, as they are protecting a great community from the erosion of outside influences, which are certainly not in the best interest of the future.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

I Understand Why Warren Davidson Voted No: Going all in for America’s economic prosperity

I’m happy that Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill passed the House and is headed for the Senate with just enough votes.  But I’m also excited to see that Warren Davidson, my congressman, voted no on it, as did Thomas Massie.  I understand the push from Trump to get complete unity on the House votes, and that stragglers and rebels send a bad message to whip up votes, because there is still more work to do in the Senate.  This bill is necessary for Trump to fulfill his second-term promises, and it is risky to pay for prosperity with massive additions to the debt.  Trump was close to pulling this off successfully during his first term in that last year, but the Covid shutdowns proved to be a strategic disaster in that it opened the door for Trump’s additions to the national debt to spiral out of control once Biden was put in office and things went off the rails.  I have been telling people for many years what Trump would do once he returned to the White House, which was best said in his book, The Art of the Comeback.  That is an excellent book that I recommend everyone read for themselves.  It is common for businesspeople to gamble big with debt to pull off a jackpot return.  If you’ve ever played poker or Blackjack, it’s the same rules, but this is what Trump was hired for by the American people and he needs this Big Beautiful Bill to pull it off, which makes the 2017 Tax Cuts permanent and puts forward the Jobs act, and introduces eliminating taxes on tips and overtime pay, car loan interest, addresses border security, energy policy and spending cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.  But it also raises the debt ceiling by 4 trillion dollars, and it is at that point, Warren Davidson became a no vote. 

If I were in Warren’s shoes, and I’ll tell him when I see him next, I would have voted the same way he did.  It means you probably won’t get invited to the next White House event, but so what?  Right is right, and Warren Davidson, just as Thomas Massie and Rand Paul in the Senate, represent an area of Ohio and Kentucky that is done with government overreach.  So they represent the kind of people in those regions well, and no amount of whipping the votes will change that.  I don’t think Warren cares about a primary.  He’s been a congressman for a while and wants to do other things.  So if Trump gets mad at him, I think he will handle it.  It is risky business to fund prosperity with increased debt.  But, we did elect Trump to do exactly that, and if Trump wins his hand, which I think he will, America will see unheard of prosperity.  And it will happen fast.  But to pull it off, America will have to become the world’s dominant economy for the next twenty years, and that is indeed Trump’s intention.  By the time this bill passes the Senate, it will be midsummer, and that is why everything had to be put into that one bill, to get the Trump agenda off and going fast during that first year of his new term.  So that by the end of the year, and going into year 2, the economy will be red hot and people will see the benefits in their pocketbooks fast.  Playing it safe won’t get us there. 

We shouldn’t be in this situation; to Warren’s point, government spending should be much less.  We can’t trust some future Congress to be responsible and to do the right thing once Trump gets the economy moving in the right direction, after so many years of neglect.  Warren could have voted yes like everyone else to support Trump, but in his district in Ohio, people would have held it against him.  And he is supposed to represent the people, not to be strong-armed by Trump’s White House.  So it’s pretty tricky business to support something without supporting it.  But they had the votes, and Warren needed his name on the right side of history to remind future congressional people that we must return to cutting government spending very shortly.  But, to Trump’s point, as a business executive who has done this many times in his past, you can’t cut off your nose to spite your face, as many have done over the years to themselves.  Without realizing that they were doing it until it was too late.  I think it will take J.D. Vance to break the tying vote to pass the bill in the Senate.  There will be some theatrics, which Trump is trying to contain vigilantly, because he has put this on his back to deliver personally.  Trump knows how to work the executive ropes, which is why he’s so effective in the world, and I am confident that his vision for massive economic expansion to cover the increased debt burden will work.  At this point, the debt is so bad that it will take bold bets to recover a jackpot. Otherwise, there will be no chance to get out of it. We are in an all-or-nothing situation.

And to answer the question people in the media are asking about the checks on power, it had to be Trump.  The value of human capital is a currency not very well understood by the world, but it does emerge in business here and there.  Consultants try to capture the essence of human capital, but it comes down to personalities and how much people want access to them.  Trump has built his brand so that people want to know him; they want their picture next to him, and Trump is using that power to drive a narrative in ways that few others in the world could.  That’s why he can step into any negotiation in the world and have a positive impact.  I’ve read all of Trump’s books, many times, and I don’t think even he understands how that type of personality is developed in business.  Only that it is forged there; once a person has it, they can turn everything into gold.  I was playing Blackjack the other night and thinking about this very problem.  Trump is making big bets on this Bill, and using all the human capital he has built over the years to pull it off.  And with Warren’s vote he is saying, essentially that he has enough pictures with the President.  That he’s ready to move on and do something else, and while the lights are on him, he wants to remind people that fiscal spending needs to be pulled in once Trump is gone.  And this vote for him is a letter in a bottle he hopes gets found and acted upon shortly.  But first, Trump knows he has to place the big bets on 21.  And he has to force his way to beat the dealer.  And it’s not a win for him, but for America in one of the most spectacular political maneuvers the world has ever seen.  And we have to remember that we elected Trump to make this bet for us, and to play this game at this level, because it is all or nothing, literally.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

A Warning for Trump: Be careful of the bootlickers and losers

This is the hard part, with the honeymoon essentially over, the Trump administration has to watch that it doesn’t lose its edge.  I’m not particularly worried about it, but it’s something Trump will have to be careful about because when it comes to deal-making, he loves doing it certainly more than the political process.  And we’re talking about falling in love with the people you negotiate with, like China, like Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, where people pander to him, massage his ego, and then slip the Shakespearian knife in Trump’s back when they think he’s not looking.  The bad guys in the world have no choice but to appease Trump. That is the case usually with my “gunfighter at the bar with his back-to-the-room” metaphor that I always talk about.  The enemy does not seek to kill valuable people if they think they can use them first, which is perfectly true with Trump and his natural ability to get leverage in just about any situation.  But it is because of this tendency that Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci lied straight to Trump’s face about COVID during the last administration, the Fed practiced Modern Monetary Theory with Larry Fink as their distribution center right under the nose of Trump.  This is the point in the story where the appeasers appease, and the suckers bite on the sweet candy and sicken themselves forever.  And Trump, if he wants to do well in this term and achieve all the things that are possible, has to be cautious about his nature.  “If you can’t beat them, join them,” is what the enemy is saying.  And adding, “then beat them when you have their trust by a last-minute betrayal.”  Trump has to resist falling in love with the bad guys under the pretense of compassion because the villainy they are capable of is far worse than his nature understands.  At heart, he has developed into a great negotiator by understanding how to read a room and its people.  And he generally does like people.  And the only defense that bad people have against such a person is to appeal to his good nature to keep him from destroying them.  And many of them need to be destroyed.

The caution comes from Pam Bondi at the DOJ, the handling of the Epstein files, and the public expectation that people will go to jail.  And James O’Keefe and Laura Loomer have been reporting that there are not so forthcoming reports on other elements, such as video of sexual exploitation of children involved in the Epstein Island personalities.  And when you play in the sandbox that Trump plays in, and Pam Bondi, it is likely that people you know are on that Epstein list, and the pain and betrayal of that can be pretty harsh.  This is the difference between campaigning and doing.  It is easy to talk about something, but not so easy to do it.  Ultimately, I think Trump will follow through on the challenges before him.  However, in trying to deal with people and salvage relationships, especially in the Middle East, sometimes his love of making friends is more than destroying an enemy, and it will be used against him.  We’re dealing with some evil people who must be dealt with harshly.  It’s what people expect and don’t necessarily want to make a deal with bad people, even if it doesn’t strengthen the American position in the world.  And Trump is going to have to fight through that carefully.  The best way to preserve Trump’s legacy is with America First and easy wins on the scoreboard.  We have the midterms coming up soon, and if Trump wants more than just a couple of years of cosmetic cooperation, he needs to put some bad guys in jail.

The judicial problem I thought was very well explained recently by Matt Gaetz on the WarRoom.  To become a judge in America, you have to jump through many hoops, belong to many clubs, and prove yourself to be a good caretaker of the BAR Association, which has shown to be very progressive and radical.  I have often pointed out, especially among older judges, their relationship to Freemasonry as a problem because of their commitment to altruism, which, for fans of Ayn Rand, is a deadly word in a productive society.  We elect Presidents, congresspeople, senators, all kinds of positions, but the hold outs to the MAGA agenda are these legal people who are connected to deep and malicious finance, and they do think they can appease the beast in Trump just long enough to crush him when his back is turned and that’s where we are.  People who survive the barriers to the judicial profession only do so by jumping through hoops of social formation that is truly devastating to the perpetuation of a productive, sovereign country, and that is what Trump is up against.  Appeasing them with kindness and good deals won’t stop the villainy of their nocturnal deeds, and their oaths to the corruptive nature of mass collectivism, through the sacrifice of self, for the benefit of others.  Many judicial types see their role in life as stopping materialists like Trump with everything they have in their very souls.  And there is no way to make friends and bring them to your side.  They have to be destroyed, and if they are on video doing nasty things with little kids on Epstein Island, they need to be torn to shreds in front of the public spectacularly because it’s what people want in our Representative Republic.

Glenn Beck ran the numbers recently through AI on the possible ways the American economy survives.  And let me say that I think most of them are wrong.   I am very optimistic about the future of America and our economy.  But we must listen to caution and do good things with the information.  However, those AI programs don’t have many scenarios where the American dollar will survive an economic collapse in the world by 2030.  And I know that’s where Trump’s heart is.  There is a good chance that the AI programs can’t see yet, because it’s more intuitive than practical, that America will lead the world in a capitalist revolution that will improve things for everyone.  But many bad people will gladly throw themselves in front of that train, and we have to have the guts to run them over.  Because those people have the wrong ideas about existence, there is no way to reform them.  And it’s through that kind of ruthlessness that America survives and thrives. But there will be a lot of casualties, and some of them will be friends.  And it will be painful.  And there is no way to negotiate away the pain.  And not fall in love with the office of the Presidency because the ceremonial routine is filled with appeasers trying to massage Trump’s ego, just long enough to outlast him.  Don’t ever lose your edge because the edge that matters is in the knife they are trying to stick in Trump’s back when they think he’ll turn his back just long enough because it’s the only move they have.  Be recklessly cautious.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Attack on Ohio’s Energy Grid: The Lawfare that put Householder in jail was an assult, not justice

To remind everyone, Larry Householder, the former Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, is serving a jail term of 20 years.  And knowing now what I said then, the case was purely about politics and nothing about justice.  The same courts that have been trying to put Trump in jail are what’s at work here.  When you are in the Speaker position and you have to raise money for your party, what are you supposed to do when a company that supplies power to the energy grid in the form of two nuclear power plants in northern Ohio are being pushed out of business by that same government, the case from top to bottom was as dirty as it gets.  And it wasn’t Householder who was the dirty dealer.  The entire FirstEnergy case is about Democrats who were jealous of the power Republicans have in Columbus, and they used lawfare to attempt to break up that control and wrestle power back in their favor.  And they targeted Householder because he was trying to save an energy company that was targeted by the Obama administration for destruction as a progressive war against energy, which we saw during the Biden administration was purposeful and malicious.  Democrats and progressives wanted to reduce the power grid away from its known levels and shove everyone into solar and wind without having any real means to supply the demand that consumers needed.  Instead, the plan was to reduce the supply and force people to cut back on their needs.  The federal government targeted FirstEnergy to go out of business so that the Ohio power grid could not sustain the needs of consumers, and that was always the real story.  I wouldn’t call what Householder was doing to try to save the company bribery, a kind of pay-to-play scheme, politics.  The real problem was the attack on Ohio’s energy grid, which was the real menace in the story.

That’s not to say that Larry Householder and others in the Republican Party were squeaky clean.  There is a way to handle a situation like that correctly, and they did not handle the pressure or the temptations well.  Calling Householder a mob boss as if he were Al Capone or some other mobster is disingenuous, and only reflects that Democrats don’t have similar personality types in their party that can take control in Columbus.  However, when it comes to Republicans, taking Householder off the map only allowed other characters to fill the void, and that’s not a bad thing.  When we elect these people, we expect to get things done, and we expect the party we elect into power to keep that power, and sometimes the game can get messy.  But we want our people to win the game by whatever means necessary.  Where the line gets crossed is when you start accepting gifts and vacations, even if well-intentioned.  For people like Householder, the power can go to their heads, and they can get lost in the process.  But the forced lapse in judgment wasn’t caused by some power-hungry maniac as much as it came from a desperate power company under attack by the government itself, seeking help from the Republican Party to stay viable.  It wasn’t mismanagement that was causing FirstEnergy to go out of business and need a bailout, it was the purposeful government rules and regulations that were intent to destroy them so that all people would be forced to turn away from their power needs and manage a shortfall, just like what California has seen with its brownouts and the push to force them to run their air conditioners less in the summer, and make concessions to their power consumption.  The attack on the American energy grid is the real story and is what is hiding behind the optics of throwing the Speaker in Ohio in jail over pure politics.

This is a war by radical communists disguising themselves as “progressives” attempting to torpedo the American economy with regulatory policy meant to destroy our energy infrastructure, and it’s no different than if planes from China had attacked our homes with a bombing campaign.  If you trace the money in the way that the federal case against Householder was conducted, you would see George Soros’s money funneling into the Ohio Democrat Party by all kinds of back-door means, and many hostile agents against America like him.  Many of the Democrats who were crying foul in the Householder case, hoping to gain political power in the vacuum of leadership during the trial, are doing the business of countries hostile to America and seeking its destruction.  When you are against the American power grid and trying to make the intent to destroy it with a feel-good environmental concern, you are doing far worse than what the Speaker was accused of.  But the complicit media played along, hung a politician they didn’t like who was a leader in a party they wanted out of power, and they used the levers of corruption of our court system to perform the task of putting someone in jail to hide their complicity in destroying the power grid of Ohio.  I hear it every time I go to Columbus, where attorneys and lawyers brag about their role in implementing solar farms, such as the one outside Chillicothe, Ohio.  And strong-arming companies into EPA compliance that could come straight out of the Karl Marx playbook. No, the real bad guys didn’t go to jail.  They jailed the people standing in their way. 

While all this was going on with Householder, the same federal court system was trying to put Trump in jail. It was destroying Rudy Giuliani’s law practice for defending Trump.  And the now-famous mug shot of Trump was broadcast around the world as the real threats to America were showing their control over our court system.  So, Householder going to jail is nothing short of an exhibition of that abuse of power.  It is tough to stay completely clean in anything when so much money is involved, and you have to give Trump credit for running about as clean a ship as anybody in his position could, because nothing stuck to him.  But if he had not won the presidency again in 2024, he would have had similar charges thrown at him as Householder saw.  And Trump would have been sentenced to not just 20 years, but over 100.   And Big Tish James would be free of any scandals of her own, which she is now wonderfully drowning in.  It’s not enough to say that they are all dirty and that corruption should be cleaned up.  The real game is that the federal government thinks it can pick winners and losers, and it picked FirstEnergy to be a loser because they were trying to supply power to a state in need.  And the government run by Obama, then by Biden, wanted to destroy that power supply to force people closer to a zero-emission world with untested clean energy they knew wasn’t ready to replace the state’s energy needs.  And they used political power through the courts they control to remove their political opponents from the battlefield, and to put them in jail to warn others away from standing in front of them.  That’s the truth about Larry Householder’s case.  And not enough people defended him when they should have, because the next victim could be anybody.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Flooding the Zone: They tried to destroy America, but now the shoe is on the other foot

It’s not because anybody told him to, as critics of President Trump’s furious pace of work are trying to say.  They keep referring to a 2019 statement made by Steve Bannon about flooding the zone with muzzle fire velocity as motivation for Trump to work at such a furious rate.  But what Bannon and other political strategists had been saying was evident as we were uncovering a massive amount of corruption that was looting itself off a government that was supposed to be run by the people of America.  But instead, it was taken over by thousands of cuts, all rooted in predatory lending meant to exploit us all for all they could and to sucker us to our doom.  What needed to be done was evident, and even back in the last decade, many of us, I was undoubtedly one of them, were saying what had to happen, and that was to flood the zone with action that needed to happen quickly, not at a pace of government that was controlled by the people causing all the problems.  The looting of our government was caused by the slow pace of action that our leadership structure could recognize, so was part of the scam.  And as we watched the worst of it, the Covid lockdowns and the election fraud, which was essentially a coup by the fourth branch of unelected government that had no right to exist, we knew what needed to be done if only we’d get another crack at it.  When Trump left the White House in January of 2021, things looked pretty bad, even unrecoverable.  And the newly installed Biden administration was rubbing our noses in it with crazy picks for his administration, sex in public buildings, and the disgrace of the Biden laptop.  Clearly, those hostile to America as a nation, Democrats especially, were cheerleading our destruction, and they were hiding their villainy behind the pace of change that would prevent anybody from stopping them.

Trump and all of us have had four years to think about what should have been done differently in that first term.  We learned who the suckers were in the Republican Party and began to primary them out of existence. But many thought it was too late.  I never did, but I always hoped that things would improve.  Some people think my optimism is a weakness, that I don’t live in reality.  Because, for them, reality is determined by the skill level of the participants.  If you have a bunch of losers trying to change a tire on a car, they will probably do a lousy job of it and even injure themselves.  But if it’s a NASCAR pit crew, changing a tire is not a big deal at all.  They will do it quickly, not hurt themselves with the tire iron, and probably still have time to eat a sandwich.  One thing was clear to me during all this, the world was being run by incompetent fools who would be easy to beat, if only we could Save America long enough to put Trump back in the White House for a second term.  So many thousands of us worked every day to make that happen if only Trump could survive the actual tyranny of a government completely out of control and drunk on power.  If Trump could survive the lawfare, the attempted assassinations, and a hostile global media that did everything it could to keep him in exile, then we just might have a chance.  “Might” is the operative word.  We were going through a period that the history of the world had never seen, so nobody knew what to expect. 

And I would tell people, even three years ago, when Trump is back in office, he’s going to flood the zone to undo all these anti-American actions draped over Washington D.C. and protected by a snail’s crawl of action by corrupt losers like Mitch McConnell.  Trump would have to flood the zone with action, where every day, things were happening that most presidential administrations would have considered to be the most significant things in their presidency.  Trump was going to have that kind of approach every day.  And people would laugh at me and giggle behind my back as if I were some crazy old man yearning for the good ol’ days as the world built highways around him.  Trump committed himself to the cause; if the people of America hadn’t re-elected him, he would be in jail by many of these same criminal government types for the rest of his life, and his family would have had all their future wealth stolen from them and given to the parasites of the world looking for a free handout using the government as the robber of wealth redistribution.  We all hoped that we could restore Trump to his proper place in the White House, and he dug in his heels and took on all comers like a great prizefighter, which is what we were looking for in a President.  He didn’t disappoint us.  I am very proud of Trump.  And I am very proud of the people who had the guts to cast a vote for him and to stand up against some of the worst people ever to show themselves to the human race.  I am proud of America for showing the world the light forward and for surviving this last decade or two, even going back to the George Bush days, and Clinton, and especially the parasitic socialist Barack Obama, the kid from Indonesia who openly tried to destroy America the way Islamic terrorists have plotted and schemed for many years.  We survived, and now it’s our turn to run the world. 

The plan was to destroy America, and many were hostile to our existence, so Trump, in his opening days upon returning to the White House, had to act quickly to flood the zone with action to undo all that had been applied.  So, of course, Trump has signed more than 50 executive orders in his opening weeks to stop the purposeful bleeding that had been going on, and he will continue to do so at a breakneck pace because it was the only thing that was going to save our country.  You only get one chance at this thing, so we must make it count.  We saw the teeth of the enemy, so there is no return to polite society to cohabitate with them, only to facilitate our doom.  It’s not that anybody told Trump what to do as a strategist.  We all knew what had to be done.  We just needed someone with the guts to do it and to have his back during the process, which is where we are now.  Obama used to say that if he couldn’t get Congress to work with him, he had a pen and a phone and would use it to bypass the legislative process. And we have seen that they meant an end to all of us.  So now that the shoe is on the other foot, we have to keep the ball and undo all they tried to implement and restore our country to what it was before all these Marxists of the world put a target on it for destruction.  That means flooding the zone with activity at a furious pace as soon as anything can be done and never looking back.  We have this one chance, and we have to make it count! 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

I’m Very Proud of J.D. Vance: Why he’s the best pick for 2028

It’s fair to say that I am very proud of J.D. Vance.  Now that he’s the Vice President in the White House, I can’t help but think of the various interactions I’ve had with him leading up to this opportunity, and I can’t help but think of it all in some divinely inspired way. It’s one of those things that you knew in the back of your mind, but conscious reality had no clue, and when those things come together, it’s just nice to look at, such as the Grand Canyon, Mt Rushmore, or the Washington Monument.  I like thinking about Washington, D.C. more these days since Trump is back in the White House. I think my wife and I are actually going to visit it soon and enjoy it with a fresh perspective.  But what’s different this time, and when I first met him, J.D. Vance already had celebrity status because of his book and Netflix movie, The Hillbilly Elegy, but to watch J.D. move up through obscurity and into the White House the way I remember it was quite a story and I have been reflecting a lot, almost as though I witnessed the hand of God move him as a chess piece through a wild and dark time.  And it took a lot of good people to make that chess move happen, and it’s a miracle.  But also an important lesson.  As I said well before Trump was re-elected, and back in July, a few days after being shot in the head from an assassination attempt, I said that people were going to be so happy with Trump that when his term was up in four years that nobody would want him to leave.  But J.D. Vance was a promising young man who would best be able to pick up the administration and continue it for another 8 years.  There will be many good people in the Republican Party who will run and offer themselves for the job.  But as J.D. Vance said to Maria Bartiromo on the first Sunday of February 2025, nobody has a front-row seat on how to be Trump in the White House other than this current Vice President.  He’ll be the best and most apparent pick to carry on what Trump started, and I’m just proud of him.

I first met J.D. Vance in the back of Nancy Nix’s yard, by her pool.  During the primaries, I was most supportive of that new senate seat for Josh Mandel because I knew he was a Tea Party kind of guy, and I was tired of RINOs in the Republican Party and didn’t want to support one more.  J.D. Vance back then had said bad things about Trump, and I wasn’t about to forget about them.  But Nancy was lobbying me to support the young man because, in a tight primary, I could have some critical things to say that might get people to vote one way or another.  So she called me and told me she would have J.D. Vance over at her house, and I should meet him.  I wasn’t excited because my wife and I were swamped then.  However, I always give Nancy time when she brings something up because she has excellent political instincts, so I went to her house to hear out J.D. Vance.  By her pool, I had a chance to talk to the future Vice President and communicated my reluctance to him and why.  I asked him why he thought he could be a good senator and withstand the temptations of all the corruption that goes on in Washington, D.C., for which he explained to me that he just wasn’t that kind of guy and that he would fight hard to represent us all well in that high office.  My first thought was that everyone says that.  But with J.D. Vance, it took on a bit more meaning, and I believed him and decided to support him.  It’s more for Nancy Nix than anything else.  But that would soon change into a life of its own.

Once J.D. Vance won, I saw him many times and always treated those times without much shock.  He was just another politician doing the work we needed him to do in Ohio, and I was happy with him.  But he was very accessible.  I was involved in a side event that involved many people for J.D. Vance to tour as part of his role as senator to bring attention to some crucial topics.  While I was talking to these people, we were talking about shared interests in the upcoming Lincoln Day Dinner, where Ron DeSantis would be the featured speaker.  I thought it might be a good idea to talk to J.D. Vance personally about other off-site things, but his people told me that Vance wouldn’t be going to the popular Butler County dinner because he didn’t want Trump to think he was endorsing the Florida Governor for President.  At that time, many people were pushing DeSantis to replace Trump in the 2024 election.  I admired that J.D. Vance was that much loyal to Trump when just about nobody else was.  And, of course, it would pay off later, down the stretch.  When it mattered most, Trump picked J.D. Vance as his VP because, under tremendous pressure, the future VP showed what he was made of when just about everyone, except for Nancy Nix, thought otherwise.

I’ve seen J.D. Vance quite a lot with Don Jr. and Bernie Moreno and had a nice front-row seat to see his political capital rise.  Looking back at all the hard work and the people who helped him along the way, with the best of intentions, he seemed pretty crazy at times to be so loyal to Trump and not appear at a very popular Butler County event to make sure his support was evident.  Nobody, except for me, thought Trump had a chance of returning to office.  But now that he has, I am pretty sure nobody will ever want to go back to the stuffy politics of a Republican in the White House again in the ways they were before Trump came along.  They will wish for Trump II, and right now, J.D. Vance is being personally trained to do that job.  And he has been doing it all the right way.  He’s from my area, there was always something special about him, even when everyone talked in their shorts under the hot summer sun in the back of Nancy Nix’s house by her pool.  And when I watch Vance on TV now and think of all the steps it took to get there because I was able to see many of them up close, it does display the hand of God reaching in and molding politics to build on earth the intentions of Heaven and to grant upon America the best that God can give to people he has picked to represent him.  So, it’s not too early to discuss J.D. Vance for 2028.  As we do, I have to say that I am proud of J.D. Vance for having the courage to accept God’s hand and not waiver when it would have been easy to do so.  He never did; he is as true to our cause as anyone on Earth.  I am proud to see him as a direct member of the Trump White House.  And the future looks very bright, and for all those reasons that he arrived there and more.

Rich Hoffman

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